Activist arrested in L.A.

Federal authorities Sunday arrested Elvira Arellano on a downtown city street, ending a yearlong standoff that intensified recently after the illegal Mexican immigrant began what was to be a nationwide campaign to push for new immigration reforms.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Arellano, 32, shortly after 2 p.m. Los Angeles time (just after 4 p.m. Chicago time,) as she and her supporters were leaving a downtown church where she sought sanctuary after slipping unnoticed out of the church on Chicago's Northwest Side where she had avoided deportation since August 2006.

As Arellano, her 8-year-old son Saul and others headed in a sport-utility vehicle along Main Street toward another leg of their trip in Northern California, several unmarked cars swarmed the vehicle, ordering her to get out as they grabbed the driver and handcuffed him, said Chicago activist Emma Lozano, who was with Arellano.

Before surrendering, Arellano asked for time alone to console her crying son, telling him: "Calm down. Don't have any fear. They can't hurt me," Lozano said. The entire incident lasted about two minutes, she said. The driver was released.

Arellano was taken in handcuffs to a nearby federal detention center, from which she was to be routed to Tijuana, according to Mexican officials. Lozano and others vowed they would fight to keep her from being deported.

U.S. authorities on Sunday night did not detail the next steps in the legal process or reveal her location.

"We have several lawyers already working on it," Lozano said, her eyes red as a group of Arellano supporters sat in stunned silence inside the Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church at "La Placita," the historic center of Mexican Los Angeles. The Catholic church is among about a dozen in several states that have served as sanctuaries for illegal immigrants who, like Arellano, have already been ordered out of the country.

Federal authorities have begun the deportation process for Arellano, who was originally ordered to leave the country in 1997, according to a statement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement put out after the arrest.

"Arellano, who was taken into custody without incident, is being processed for removal to Mexico based upon a deportation order originally issued by a federal immigration judge in 1997," the statement said. "Arresting and removing criminal aliens is one of ICE's top enforcement priorities and the agency will continue to pursue these cases vigorously."

In recent months, arrests of fugitives such as Arellano have been occurring at a pace of some 675 per week. Federal authorities have ramped up workplace raids and increased other types of immigration enforcement as part of a hardened approach to illegal immigration after a bipartisan bill that would have offered legalization failed in the Senate earlier this month.

Much of the anger from across the political spectrum surrounding illegal immigration has been crystallized by Arellano's story. After entering the country illegally twice, she became an activist shortly after she was arrested in 2002 during a federal sweep at O'Hare International Airport, where Arellano cleaned airplanes. She was later convicted of using a fake Social Security card.

Last week, Arellano announced she would try to mobilize efforts for more lenient reforms by leaving the Adalberto United Methodist Church for the first time since arriving there last August and traveling to Washington for an 8-hour prayer and fast vigil scheduled for Sept. 12.

Fearing arrest, she kept secret the group's plans of first going to other cities in an attempt to build national momentum leading toward the vigil. After leaving Chicago on Thursday, she arrived in Los Angeles Saturday morning for the first stop in that campaign, which coincided with a local immigration march.

Arellano spent most of her day Sunday urging audiences of several hundred parishioners inside four separate churches to lobby House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other congressional members from California to take up immigration reform immediately after returning from summer recess. Between stops, she donned a pair of sunglasses and slipped into the back of her group's electric blue sport-utility vehicle with her son.

"It's important that we are unified so that we can bring out the message that we're all struggling together," Arellano said at the Angelica Lutheran Church, inside Los Angeles' Pico-Union neighborhood, a port of entry for Central American immigrants. "The hate you are seeing build around the country has no boundaries."

Arellano took refuge inside the tiny Adalberto Methodist Church in Humboldt Park on Aug. 15, 2006, the day she was to report to federal authorities. Her freedom stoked the ire of conservative groups, who saw it as a glaring example of government inaction that has allowed the undocumented immigrant population to grow past 12 million people.

Rick Biesada, director and founder of the Chicago Minuteman Project, lauded the arrest, but he said it came a year too late.

"I was wondering why the police were dragging their feet," he said. "By not going in there and getting her, other illegals were going to churches seeking sanctuary. Now we're going to have hell to pay in this country trying to extract these people."

Chicago Spanish-language radio host Javier Salas said he felt badly for what happened to Arellano. But in leaving the sanctuary of Adalberto United Methodist Church and heading to Los Angeles, it was only a matter of time before she was arrested.

"I'm not happy that this happened, but it was bound to happen because she was challenging the system," said Salas, the host of the morning-drive talk show La Tremenda on WRTO AM-1200.

By Sunday afternoon, Salas was already on radio talking about the arrest, and callers were weighing in too.

Callers were "saying that she was traveling to Los Angeles and around the United States, she would provoke [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the anti-immigrant groups," he said. "There would be checkpoints everywhere."

Salas questioned why it appeared that mainstream media make Arellano out to be the face of undocumented immigrants, while her actions have exacerbated the animosity toward them.

"She wasn't down to earth," he said, adding that Arellano acted entitled to rights "when there's thousands and thousands of people in the same situation."

"She made everything worse," Salas said. "She's not a face of the immigrants. My family without papers, she doesn't represent them."

"Everyone knew it was probably a question of when, not if," said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "It just makes me feel really sad because she knows she's looking at time in prison."

Jacobita Alonso, a lay leader at the church who stayed with Arellano on the second-floor apartment during the last year, felt compelled to action.

"We cannot sit here only grieving. All we can do is organize our people. We want her to know she is not alone," she said Sunday.

Amid heavy rainfall Sunday night, about three dozen people sang, prayed and read passages from the Bible during a vigil Sunday night outside the Chicago headquarters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement downtown to show their disapproval of her arrest. They sang, prayed, read from the Bible.

"It's a sad day," said Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd.) "We need comprehensive immigration reform that keeps families together. A young boy, a U.S. citizen, lost his mother to a broken system. Elvira has put a face to this struggle. There are 12 million illegal immigrants that head to work every morning, not knowing if they'll come home at the end of the day."

Late Sunday, her son, Saul, was under the care of the Rev. Walter Coleman, pastor of Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago, and Emma Lozano's husband.

After the arrest, in a second-floor living space at the Our Lady Queen of Angels church where Arellano slept the night before, Saul sat on a leather couch and stared blankly at a nearby hamster cage.

An hour earlier, he and his mother had been playing with the hamsters, pets owned by the local pastor, the Rev. Richard Estrada. Saul's mother squealed in mock fear of the creatures in a rare moment of easiness during their whirlwind trip.

Asked if he wanted to visit his mother in prison, Saul shook his head violently and yanked himself away.

"You don't want to go?" Lozano asked him.

"No," he said, watching the hamsters. "No."

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aolivo@tribune.com

IN THE WEB EDITION: Elvira Arellano spent a year in a Chicago church to avoid deportation before her arrest on Sunday. Find stories, videos and photos chronicling the year at chicagotribune.com/arellano